“Here and There” by Daphne Marlatt

here & there, a new book by University of Manitoba writer-in-residence Daphne Marlatt, raises questions about language and world, about self and other, in a writing which moves immediately from one perceptual moment to another. For Marlatt movement is “move meant or implied”. In here & there, writing is like flying, like swimming, like driving a car.

Marlatt’s writing proceeds by association of words and phrases. On the page, it resembles prose, with sentence and paragraph divisions. But, as the linguist Ernest Fenellosa once said:

no full sentence really completes a thought … The truth is that acts are successive, even continuous: one causes or passes into another. And though we may string never so many clauses into a single compound sentence, motion leaks everywhere, like electricity from an exposed wire. All processes in nature are interrelated; and thus there could be no complete sentence … save one which it would take all time to pronounce.

Marlatt is aware of this and she does not attempt to pronounce upon, to make a statement about. Preferring move-ment, she seeks openings, not completions. She goes to those places where motion is leaking — at the fissures between word and world.

So she writes: “begin with á.” This phrase, which begins the seventh poem in the series, comes from a note written on the envelope of a letter Marlatt received. She recalls the phrase as she drives along the river with “its damned up steps &/ falls of metered water, transformed in a hum of wires.” Like this river which has been forced out of its natural rhythms so that it can be controlled and used by man, the poet is confined by the rigidities and narrow limits of a culturally determined language.

The way we use language — the way we name our relations to things — determines the way we view things. And, if language is not continually renewed, then it becomes impossible for thought and behavioural patterns to change and develop. When this happens, people no longer use language; language begins to use us. For example, as Marlatt writes, when “i make you he, object out there to see so/ seeing you I can be clear,” this only succeeds in “leaving me with i” and the necessity then to “string out bridges of words to seek you there.”

In making these word bridges, however, the poet discovers that although the gap between any two people can never be completely or permanently closed by language, the very recognition of separateness allows some relief from the frustrations of failed language:

between us the rushing a-byss, a, not, undone, undoing all my bridges in itself a blue so clear you & i fade into a, note, a single letter a

Typically for Marlatt, insight comes through close attention to language, in this case to the word “abyss”. And the poem which began with a note from a friend’s letter comes to rest on “a, note, a single letter a”. The following poem opens: “from somewhere downhill trumpet notes rise on the rustling air”.

begin with á. The French language preposition for at, in, to, from, of, on, for, by, with. Prepositions place things. They preposition them. They operate as directives. Pronouns do too. Pronouns (I, you, he, she, etc.) are like the lines marked on a highway: “(keep-to-your-side)”. Prepositions and pronouns are conventions of our language, but they are not themselves the external realities to which they refer, in the same way that a map is not the territory.

here & there questions where we are situated with regard to language and outer reality. The book persists in asking to what extent is our use of language a protection against too much raw information, and to what extent is it a limitation imposed upon how we know and what we can know of ourselves and the rest of the world? To what extent is our sense of the inadequacy of language changing our language use into “a barricade against high/ tides of emptiness”? The following extract from here & there illustrates how Marlatt works:

i call out, i greet you in the sentence no
lament but ranging free as a fallow deer follows the outline of its
range its local elsewhere.

éclair, a clap, a flash of light he said the sentence in its movement
is, natural as high-tension electrical discharge shifts, in a flash,
from i to you. i greet you. i hear you. i here you there
night tear

into flame, flash in the instant this sutra passes its
thread thru several minds, its word a light the 8th century
ignites then・there・them (to) here・hither・him (in)

you i am writing to inside the sentence writing not it is written,
it writes. it tears them free, lightning vivid tears them free
of night these ranges of word syntax flares to you out there i am

driving to not at, hurled thru apparitions that cloud up seeing,
past,& passes me onward, me sententious, turns in passing me
along it, (h)it, here we come, past these faces, facets i’ve come
to recognize in passing certain aspects of the way we head into it,
sentient, sensing our way thru, sand, send, sent in the sentence.

(from “in passing”)

We are joined both in language and in our common sensual experience — “multiple bathers con-/ strained, multiple selves all joined in one warmth below cool/ separateness above.” But since, as Marlatt has said in an interview, “… you simply aren’t given, in reality, that other out there,” it is just not possible to represent experience in language, though we persist in believing or pretending that it is. We expect the “here” of language to match up with the “there” of world and experience. Language is “our horizon (o breath) & medium,” but it is not the source or the centre as our cultural legacy and institutions would have us believe. For Marlatt, there is no centre. There is here & there. ■

Pamela Banting is a Winnipeg poet whose first book, Running Into the Open, was published this year by Turnstone Press.